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regarded Sophie as vulgar, and she and Sophie’s mother were instant enemies. ‘The creator of Milo Fane can marry anybody .’ Monty had been earlier informed by his mother. She had imagined for him a frail elegant delicately nurtured English girl (possibly with a tide) whom she would have dominated and made into a junior ally. In fact, she would probably have found means to hate any woman Monty married.
    Monty’s father, a poor curate, had died when Monty was eight. A week after the death, his mother had instructed him henceforth to call her by her given name: Leonie. Something unintelligible and dark entered with this portentous name into the relationship. Leonie, who had always wanted to be an actress (doubtless another reason for Sophie’s unpopularity) gallantly supported her son and only child by teaching elocution and singing at a girls’ school. She was delighted when Monty went to Oxford, dashed when he did less than brilliantly, yet more dashed when he became a schoolmaster, delighted when he ceased to be a schoolmaster, and became a successful writer, dashed again when he married a shrill-voiced unreticent foreigner. Now the time for delight had come round once more. Sophie was dead and tidied away. Leonie could not, and indeed scarcely tried to, conceal her satisfaction, but at least she kept away. She had been discreetly ‘ill’ on the day of the funeral. Perhaps she might have been unable to restrain herself from dancing. Now she had retired quietly once more to the little house which Monty had bought for her in a Kentish village, where she played at grande dame country life. She had not yet, but soon would, inflict her triumphant presence: eater-up, taker-over. The first wild period of rejoicing (mourning) must shortly be deemed to be done with. Her sugary letters arrived now almost daily. She wanted the house, she wanted the things in it, of course she wanted him. She had hungered for a grandson, but there had been only the one miscarriage.
    The thought of his mother caused Monty little emotion. That did not matter. He was fond of his mother. He understood her attitudes. He even sympathized. Her glee simply did not concern him. He was so scoured by death, so scalded and sterilized, he could not feel the petty irritations of which ordinary life is composed. His mother could not touch him, he had become untouchable. He felt indestructible because destroyed. An awful separateness had come upon him in the later days of Sophie’s illness. He could not bring himself to take his wife in his arms, not (as she thought) because her illness had made her hideous: it was that death had already taken hold of her and he could not bear the sense of utter loss which her still-breathing body inspired. He had heard of people embracing and kissing their dead. He could not have done so. The absence of the loved person is so absolute. And as she lay dying he felt even more the tormenting impossibility of touching that body where, every day, she so dreadfully still was.
    What a tumultuous history their married life had been. There had not been very many years of it. Monty had married late. Sophie had always been stupidly flirtatious, a muddler. He had been chronically jealous, a harsh judge. He lectured. She wept. She reviled him. They went to bed. It was too often like that. The great sphere, as he pictured it, of their love had often been strained and made to shudder, but had never actually broken. There had just been endless trouble, endless rows, endless new starts. Locketts had been a new start. Before that they had lived in a series of flats in Kensington and Chelsea. Sophie then professed to want to live ‘in the country’, and Monty, although he did not particularly care for the country, had been pleased by the idea of at last ‘carrying her away’. He would have liked to lock her up, to chain her. They compromised upon this umbrageous pretty almost-suburb. Sophie had liked the house, but started complaining at